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“No. He just looked down at the picture. I was lying on my stomach, I guess trying to crawl or something, all blobby baby. And he looked at the picture and said he should have known I’d never be anything but a disappointment.”
“Asshole,” she said on a low mutter.
I didn’t contradict her or agree, but instead nodded at her, hoping she would continue.
“He said something similar. Said that you were premature, born way sooner than you should have been after our wedding, but still huge. That it didn’t add up to him.
“I tried to talk through it, tried to remind him when I had told him about the pregnancy, told him that you were perfectly healthy and beautiful. And his,” she said.
I sighed, and she leaned back on the bench, that faraway look still in her eyes.
“I thought that it worked, but I guess I was wrong. He never believed me. Or,” she said.
“Or what?”
“He needed to not believe me. Had to convince himself you belonged to someone else, needed to think that I had set him up.”
“What, as justification for all the shit he did?” I asked.
She nodded. “If I had cheated on him, why stick with me? If I had tried to pretend someone else’s baby was his…”
“Why should he feel bad about sticking you in a mental institution?”
She nodded.
“Or feel bad about treating me like shit. Because I wasn’t his, after all,” I said.
“Exactly. It’s twisted, but that’s Raphael James’s logic. And I bet at some point he even started to believe. Had convinced himself that all his lies were truth.”
She stopped then shifted on the bench to look at me. She reached out to touch my shoulder then pulled her hand away, but she didn’t ever look away from my eyes.
“Amethyst, Raphael is your father. I don’t care what he told you. He is. I know my words might not mean anything now. But I swear to you that he is. And even more, I swear to you that I will not keep anything from you. I won’t try to take anything from you, either. I just want to be there for you. I know that we can’t make up for lost time, but hope that going forward, we can—”
Her voice cracked, and the tears she had been fighting suddenly sprang up in her eyes.
I grabbed her hand, squeezed it tight.
“We can try,” I whispered. “We will try.”
